It may be a shock to the system for Premier League chief Richard Scudamore and all those male chauvinist pigs who like to diss women, but girl power is on the up in British sport.

We have already recorded here how Liz Nicholl, arguably the most influential female figure in the sports business as chief executive of funding body UK Sport, reckons the glass ceiling is visibly cracking, with so many female icons post 2012 and Sochi 2014 and performances that in so many cases - not least in cycling, gymnastics, athletics and winter sports - that are superior to men.

"This is a good time for women in sport," she told insidethegames, pointing out that there were more GB female medallists in the Sochi than men, and almost as many as men in Summer Games.

Nicholl herself is at the vanguard of a growing battalion of female power players, like the feisty black lawyer Heather Rabbatts. The ex-Millwall chair, now independent  Football Association Board member and a strident voice in football, claims the recent exposure of tasteless emails sent by Scudamore about women are indicative of "a closed culture of sexism" within the Premier League.

If Scudamore really does believe women remain the weaker sex and easy prey for his double entendre scribbling, perhaps he should make the acquaintance of a teenage girl from Yorkshire named Rebekah Tiler.

She'd quickly put him in his place. Or heave him over her head...

Premier League Chief Richard Scudamore has been strongly criticised for writing a string of sexist emails ©Getty Images



Here is a literal example of the sort of girl power that is putting women on top in several areas of British sport.

At just 15, this grammar schoolgirl can already claim to be Britain's strongest woman, a weightlifter who regularly heaves a combined total of three times her own 69 kilogram body weight and is currently outlifting competitors 10 years her senior.

Her immense strength puts her, pound for pound, in pole position as the nation's leading strongwoman now that Michaela Breeze, the former Welsh Commonwealth Games silver medallist, previously acknowledged as the strongest female in British sport, has retired.

It may seem a huge burden to bear for this intelligently engaging youngster but she is used to having large weights on her well-sculpted shoulders.

So much so that she is now potentially worth her own weight in gold, the colour of the medal she dreams of winning as the first Briton to win an Olympic weightlifting title.

That dream is now being honed in a small gym in the West Yorkshire village of Mytholmroyd - birthplace of former poet laureate Ted Hughes, author of The Iron Woman. It is an appropriate workshop.

No sport, perhaps with the exception of boxing, reflects the escalating encroachment of women into a world once regarded as essentially a male domain than weightlifting.

Sport England's Active People figures show that 12,700 women aged 16 and over are now regularly taking part in weightlifting at least once a month, an increase of over 3,000 in the past 18 months.

Only boxing, on the back of the golden triumph of Nicola Adams at London 2012, has shown a greater percentage participation among women in contact or power sports - rocketing by 8,000 to over 35,000. And in contact sports like judo and wrestling, also rising in terms of numbers, female weightlifters are now achieving greater success than their male counterparts at international level.

Nicola Adams, who became the first woman to win a boxing gold in Olympic history at London 2012, has helped spark a rise in the number of women taking part in contact or power sports ©Getty Images



Tiler's coach Eddie Halstead says: "More and more girls are lifting weights in the gym and we want to encourage more to come into the sport. They won't end up with veins popping out of their shoulders and they won't lose their figures. Weightlifting doesn't turn people into hulks - it's a totally different sport to body-building."

Ashley Metcalfe, the former Yorkshire and England cricketer who became chief executive of Leeds-based British Weightlifting a year ago, tells us: "We have spent a lot of time lifting the profile of the sport for women, making them aware just how exciting it is not just as a sport but for their health and fitness.

"Most of our female lifters are young, fit, good-looking women. Power sports attract more girls these days because the fear barrier has been broken down.

"The sport has been a bit in the doldrums in this country but we now have some exciting young talent, both male and female. Rebekah Tiler, Zoe Smith, Emily Godfrey, Sarah Davis and Mercy Brown are among those who are consistently breaking records in the snatch and clean and jerk. Rebekah and Zoe are both from grammar schools. It helps to have some degree of intelligence to understand the technical side of lifting.

"It's great that the girls are now producing the goods."

It is largely because of weightlifting's new strategy in targeting resources on their best female athletes like Tiler that funding body UK Sport have now restored the sport to their World Class Performance Programme.

"Astonishing," is how her coach Eddie Halstead describes the power of Britain's new weightlifting wonder."What she is doing would be phenomenal for a young man, but for a girl, it is incredible.

"She's the best talent I've seen in a very long time. Zoe Smith [who competed for GB at London 2012] is a quality lifter but Rebekah will go marching on past. If she carries on progressing at the rate she is now, she'll end up lifting 235-240kg combined, which is world-class."

Tiler can not only overcome all her domestic female rivals but most boys of similar age, "although I don't actually compete against them, of course", she says.

Tiler has already won gold in a record-breaking performance at the European Youth Championships in Lithuania this year to become a genuinely awesome prospect in a sport which has not seen a British lifter anywhere near the Olympic podium for 30 years, let alone on top of it.

A former UK Schools sprint champion with the physique of a stocky welterweight boxer and the power of a pantechnicon in both arms, Tiler is causing eyebrows to raise as high as her coach's expectations in this macho, muscled world.

Rebekah Tiler has aspirations of following in compatriot Zoe Smith's footsteps by competing at an Olympics, but it's at Tokyo 2020 where coach Eddie Halstead believes a medal is possible ©Getty Images





Recently she compounded her Euro success by becoming the youngest weightlifter to win a senior women's British title, taking gold in 69kg class in Coventry. Her total of 205kg would also have been good enough to win gold in both the higher 75kg and over 75kg categories.

No dumb belle, either. She attends Bingley Grammar School, where she is studying for her GCSEs and hopes to go to university. "My schoolwork fits in around my evening training quite easily and they have been very supportive in giving me time off for competitions," she says. "The teachers think what I do is cool."

So is supported by a local butcher, Ian Hewitt, a sponsor whose liberal supplies of steak and chicken play a vital role in sustaining girlpower in the Tiler household in Denholme, where Rebekah's three younger sisters, Sophie,11, nine-year-old Lisa and five-year-old Emily are all budding lifters. "The five-year-old copies me, grabs a stick and tries to clean and jerk," says Tiler.

Weightlifters, like fine wine, usually mature with age. They need the years of repetitive training to steadily improve strength and technique as their bodies develop to reach their peak.

Mum Emma says that as a toddler, Rebekah would lift mini dumb-bells at the knee of dad Chris, a keen bodybuilder.

But her first love was athletics. "It was when I got tested at a performance centre in Rochdale that a coach told me, 'You're so strong you should take up weightlifting.' I thought it was a joke - but I was in the gym a week later lifting weights.

"It was a hard decision but a good one because I was stronger than I was fast, although the speed I had coming out of the blocks as a sprinter really helped with lifting weights because I could get off my haunches quicker."

"The first time I saw her was at a kids' competition in the North-East," says Halstead, who has been working with Tiler since 2011. "She walked up to the bar and hoofed it above her head at 90mph. I thought: 'Wow, what an opportunity it would be if I could work with that girl.'

Tiler finds it difficult to keep track of the number of records she has broken - somewhere north of 200 in a sport where they can be shattered as frequently as plates in a Greek restaurant.

Her first senior international will be representing England in the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow where Halstead believes a medal is a strong possibility. Then it's Rio 2016. "She'll definitely finish in the top 10 there but what we are looking for is a medal at the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.

Ambitious as she is, Tiler seems happy to play the weighting game. "Now my mates don't really see what I do as unusual," she says. "Their attitude is just, 'Keep doing it'.

"Some of the lads at school are like 'why are you so strong?! You're a girl, you shouldn't be like this!' I'm constantly being challenged to arm wrestles - but I always win."

Uplifting, you might say.

Alan Hubbard is an award-winning sports columnist for The Independent on Sunday and a former sports editor of The Observer. He has covered a total of 16 Summer and Winter Games, 10 Commonwealth Games, several football World Cups and world title fights from Atlanta to Zaire.